Juchu Kaisen - 45

Chapter 45

I stood under the Torii gate before the staircase down Ushiro Mountain, at the edge of campus, Shoko next to me, when I stopped and turned around.

Gojo Satoru and Geto Suguru had just teleported around thirty yards behind us, Gojo having used Limitless to achieve this feat.

“And where do you young girls think you’re going this time of day?” Gojo grinned as he jogged up towards us. Suguru grinned and waved at us.

“It’s five PM,” Shoko said. “Quit acting like a damn chaperone or something.”

“Hitting the town unattended?” Gojo asked.

“I know you clanners are stuck in the Heian era,” Shoko said. “But I assure you, we’ll probably be fine.”

“It’s business, Gojo,” I said, cutting past the banter. “I’m meeting with a business associate.”

“And why does Shoko get to follow you?” Gojo asked.

“Her skills will be needed,” I said. I predicted the trajectory of the conversation. Gojo would keep pressing and I…

…didn’t really have a reason to push him away on this. If anything, it might be personally amusing to me.

“You can come if you want,” I said. “Both of you. It won’t be dangerous or anything.”

“Cool!” Gojo grinned widely. Then, he paused and looked pensive. “But I gotta ask, Teira—and I really have been meaning to ask for a long time, but as you said, boys shouldn’t comment on women’s bodies and all that, but… how do you usually… you know… go out? Among non-sorcerers, that is?”

“That’s simple,” I smiled. “I don’t. In fact, I haven’t ever done that as of yet. I have, of course, thought of that, and my solution is pretty simple.”

I transformed my skin from a ghastly pallor to a healthier one.

I summoned a portal to retrieve a two-piece headband that I locked around my antennae. Then I retrieved a pair of glasses from the same space—cursed tools with an illusory innate technique that I could use to cast a persistent illusion on my eyes, turning them into normal orbs with teal irises. They would mimic my eye-movements as well.

I spread my arms and grinned. “Ta-dah!”

“Whoa,” Shoko gasped.

“That’s amazing,” Suguru murmured.

“Wait—you could have looked normal all this time?!” Satoru shouted.

“Well, this isn’t my normal,” I grinned. “This is the disguise. But yes. I have a limited amount of shapeshifting abilities, owing to the idiosyncrasies of my soul. Changing my skin color to this extent is just barely within my abilities, though I will unfortunately never be able to really put on a tan.” Even by human standards, this complexion was quite fair.

Like all things Jujutsu, this, too, had costs attached to it. It was a departure from my base form, so holding it was straining in a unique way. It was a strain that I couldn’t heal away using the Reverse Cursed Technique, nor was it a mental strain that I could just wave away with my cursed trait. It was a strain of the soul itself.

Far less of a strain than my combat form, of course. I could hold this skin-color for as long as I wanted, but it was uncomfortable. And unnecessary, as long as I was only dealing with fellow sorcerers.

“The glasses are a nice touch,” Suguru said to me. “They suit you.”

“Thank you,” I smiled.

“Wait, you’ve never been among non-sorcerers?” Gojo asked, tilting his head.

“My Juchū have.”

“But physically.”

“If I needed food or other products from non-sorcerers, I just had my servants fetch them for me, or my Juchū—whichever was the least conspicuous,” I explained patiently. “So no. I never had a reason to leave the clan compound until now.”

“But why?”

“She was taking a bath,” Shoko giggled. I clicked my tongue and grinned at her a little.

“I was… busy,” I said. I turned around to head down the mountain steps. “Anyway, let’s not waste any more time. Someone’s dying after all.”

“What?!” Gojo shouted, jogging after me. “You should have led with that!”

000

Fushiguro Toji’s day couldn’t have been worse if the entire Earth was swallowed up by a black hole.

The only day that could have even remotely approached the awfulness of this day was his first loss after defecting from the Zen'in clan, in the hands of the precocious young brat from the Hibana clan.

He remembered that day like it was yesterday, even though there had been a time when the brain trauma had been so severe that he had almost forgotten his own name.

Black lightning blooming with each attack from her tiny, eight-year-old fists.

Hellfire raining down from the sky like God’s very own fist.

A body shattered, seemingly beyond repair.

He remembered the subsequent days in snippets as his preternatural self-healing prowess had worked to slowly, but surely piece him back together while he crawled around the forest outside the city of Gifu, sucking up pondwater for sustenance, and keeping his mouth open and pointed towards the sky when it rained.

He had lost his mind for a time as his body healed before his brain did, and he captured birds and deer, eating them raw, reverting into early man as he forcefully clawed his way to full health. His only companion had been his inventory curse which he at the time had tried to kill and eat, only to discover that the monster was indestructible and wholly resistant to his fingers and teeth.

Over time, he had formed a grudging bond with it.

Still: three months spent in this pit of idiocy and savagery, only to eventually have all his memories and his personality slam back into his body with a vengeance.

He had broken into someone’s house to groom himself, afterwards discovering a set of new scars to go with the one on his lip, the one earned from a childhood of survival.

One scar ran down on the side of his skull like a crack, crossing over his left eye and terminating next to his lip. Another was on his right eye from when that knife had stabbed into it and sliced open the cavity above and under it.

The eye had healed back—miraculously enough, but the bone on the eyehole was ridged where the knife had cut, and the skin was still scarred.

Those were only the scars on his face.

The rest of his body had ended up a tapestry of damage. The left side of his abdomen had more scar-tissue than healthy tissue, and lacerations covered nearly every inch of him—his arms, legs, torso. Back.

The sight had filled him with such unending spite and hatred.

He would kill her. He would kill her—

That was when she appeared in front of him, in the form of one of her Juchū. A moth woman.

Inside the living room of the home he had commandeered, she stood there, flanked by three more Juchū. Not the mantis-types, but different. Ant-like, for one, and more humanoid. Taller. And they felt… stronger.

“You’re healthy. Good. Time for round three.”

No preamble. No cursing.

They went right to business. The battle nigh-on instantly shattered the little house and dragged on into the wilderness.

Minutes later, Toji had managed to destroy one of the ant Juchū, but not before the rest of them pinned him down before the moth-woman Juchū. The surrounding trees in the forest had been torn down in the wake of their battle, and on one giant tree, one of the ant-Juchū were pinned into it by its own arm, courtesy of Toji.

“I’ll break you as many times as it takes, Toji,” the Juchū said. “Until you finally get the picture. You can work for me. Or you can still work for me by being an outlet. The choice is yours.”

“The hell do you want?” Toji growled.

“What I want is for you to regret the day you ever fucked with me,” she said. “But I’m choosing to be productive about my spite, which is why I want you to work for me as well.”

“And do what?”

“I want you to find a certain man,” she said. “He has stitches on his forehead, surrounding his entire skull, like so,” the Juchū indicated the shape of the stitched scar on its own head with its fingers. “Naturally, I will need you to stop being Zen'in Toji, the mercenary. No more jobs. No more involving yourself with curse users. You’re a good boy, now. That’s all I’ll let you be, my dear monkey.”

Monkey.

“Don’t you fucking dare!” Toji roared.

“Why not? It’s what you called yourself.”

“I’ll kill you.”

The moth woman looked up with a grin. “I figured you’d say that. My… weapon is only twenty seconds away from crashing into us all. If you want to once again revert into a raving madman with even more scars on that grotesque, monkey-like body of yours, all you need to do is continue wagging that tongue of yours!”

In that moment, Zen'in Toji had remembered the true meaning of fear.

The months spent in confusion, in which his mind hadn’t been his own. His body betraying him by keeping him alive even when much of his brain had been turned into blood and gore soup—wreaking havoc across his emotions and senses, making him see things, remember things—

“No,” he said. “Stop.”

“Say ‘please’.”

“…Please.”

He felt a part of him shatter at the word. The part of him that promised him that he would never again have to live with his head hung low. The part of him that knew that should he want it, he could take out the Zen'in clan on his own—that they were not a threat to him, nor would they ever again be.

But the worst day in the Zen'in clan was nothing compared to what this girl was promising. Nothing at all.

His stomach turned against him and he felt sick. He struggled to escape the hold of the ants, but more appeared from the shadows to hold him down. Individually, they had been so troublesome, but this…?

“No, no, no, please, please don’t do it again!”

Toji had begged.

For minutes, he had begged and debased himself before a mere shikigami.

“Then you’ll do it?” she finally said. “You’ll find this man for me?”

“Yes! Yes, just please—!”

“You sure have lived a blessed life, Toji-kun,” the shikigami shook her head, grinning. “If all it took to break you was this. No real difficulties. No true challenges. The Zen'in were soft on you.”

“Please, just let me go—“

“Nothing to say to that, huh? Of course not. You know I’m right. And if I’m right, doesn’t that mean that your existence is invalid after all?” she giggled. “Ah, what am I doing? This isn’t fun anymore.” The moth-woman kicked his face. It barely hurt. “Fine—no torture. You deserve it, for giving up like a good little monkey. I’ll let you go.”

The moth-woman’s sharp grin would never leave his memory for the rest of his life.

“If you say it,” she said.

“Say what?” he breathed.

“That you’re a good little monkey, of course.”

“I’m…”

Fushiguro Toji blinked away the memories.

The last seven years hadn’t been easy, but they had been a dream compared to that day.

The crazy bitch had given him a stipend while he worked on trying to find her stitched-up person of interest. He had found a body missing a head, belonging to a guy known as Mori Tachi—the brother of the ones that had hired him to kill Hibana in the first place.

She hadn’t been convinced, and he had continued searching.

And somehow, in some way, he managed the impossible.

He fell in love with a woman that loved him back. A woman that didn’t mind his monstrous exterior, or his callous interior.

He married.

He gave up his cursed surname.

He fathered a child.

He entertained the notion that he could change, that the curses keeping him tied to his beloved cycle of killing, earning and playing around didn’t have to define him.

And the crazy bitch had… cut him loose for it.

His work had returned nothing at all, and she had grown tired of bullying him. She had even sent him a fucking envelope filled with cash for their wedding.

Toji had been free. For a precious two years, he had been free of his cursed sponsor.

Free from one curse, and saddled with another.

His wife was… ridiculously accident-prone.

The first time they had met, he had saved her from being run over by a truck. A bit after they had started dating, in a crowded metro station, some asshole had decided to pick her as a target to which he would ram himself into full force, while Toji had been away getting some drinks from a nearby vending machine.

Moments later, she had pinballed against no less than twenty people before eventually tripping into the metro tracks a second before the train arrived.

Toji had rescued her then, and broken the spine of the asshole that had crashed into her for no damn reason—and he had done it too fast for any surveillance cameras to detect.

After they married and she became pregnant, Toji had dedicated his mind and soul into protecting her day in and day out as he slowly came to a conclusion.

Fushiguro Yumeko was cursed with misfortune.

The pregnancy had been mercifully smooth, but the delivery had been all but. She had survived, but it was unlikely that she’d ever birth another child.

Things had taken a turn at that point. The world itself conspired to end her as all manner of misfortunes continued befalling her. Toji had stuck to her like glue, refusing to let her leave his sight when they left the house. And for a time, it had helped.

And so, the world had been forced to get creative, by attacking her not from the outside, but from the inside, turning her own body against her.

Cancer. In the brain.

He sat next to her hospital bed, cradling Megumi’s sleeping form while holding Yumeko’s hand. The doctors had said ‘any day’ now.

‘Any day’ had been a month ago. The wait alone had frayed his nerves with a vengeance, leading him to do the one thing he had promised himself never to do again—he had decided to re-involve himself with the human curse that was Hibana Teira.

In accepting his wife’s demise, he had found a modicum of peace.

In waiting for his wife’s demise, the curse of hope had taken hold in his heart, and had chased away that peace. It had compelled him to exhaust every option, no matter the cost.

It had accused him of treachery. Questioned his devotion to his wife.

A man who truly loved his wife would do anything for them, after all.

This, however…

There was no telling what Teira would do. Whether she would help him or damn his family to hell just for a quick laugh. Her spite knew no bounds.

He heard four pairs of legs walk in the hallway outside, towards him. He smelled their cursed energy, like struck matches, and found that they were thick with the stench.

Jujutsu Sorcerers.

Three new scents. No, two. One of them were vaguely familiar—like how he remembered Teira in the flesh, yet not quite. There was an afterscent of something bitter and poisonous to her now.

And one, he hadn’t smelled in nine years, since the last time he had travelled to the Gojo clan compound to lay eyes on the golden child of Jujutsu.

Gojo Satoru had come.

Toji debated on throwing up his inventory curse, but decided against it.

He couldn’t afford to fight, not while he was still holding his child. Not while his wife was nearby.

He stood up and left the room, intercepting the four in the hallway.

Hibana Teira had grown. She was a young woman now, far taller than average. Taller than most grown men, even. She wore glasses now, and she disguised her antennae—now drooping at the ends—as a hairband. She wore a dark blue kosode and hakama, and a golden haori with a pattern of white insects. And on her chest was a golden badge with a black spiral—the symbol of Jujutsu High.

Gojo Satoru, too, wore a Jujutsu High uniform. Odd. The boy had no reason to go to either of the Jujutsu schools. Was it on a lark? Perhaps it was the same lark that had inspired Teira to do the same.

The other two were less noteworthy. They had the look, feel and scent of non-sorcerers about them, like they were new to this world. Still, they were sorcerers. That much couldn’t be denied.

“You came,” Toji said quietly.

Teira snorted. “Surprising, right? I do have my moments of unbridled charity.”

“Have we met?” Gojo looked at Toji with an incredulous grin. “I can’t remember when and where, though, which is odd… I would have remembered seeing a face like yours.”

“Toji-kun has a thing for stalking young, talented sorcerers,” Teira said. “You might have seen him lurking outside your bedroom window. Don’t worry—I trained those behaviors out of him a long time ago.”

“Toji?” Gojo asked. His eyes widened, and he grinned. “That Toji…”

So the Six Eyes knew of him.

Figured.

“Hibana Teira,” Toji began. “Please help me save my wife.” He got down on his knees and bowed, while holding his child. He pressed his forehead against the floor.

The time for shame was long behind him.

“Teira…” the other guy in the group said. “Is this really necessary?”

“I was eight when he gave me this scar. You know why? For money.”

“I’ve heard the story,” the other girl said. “But it’s still a lot, Teira. Please.”

“Ugh,” Teira scoffed. “Alright, fine. Get up, Toji. I’m here, aren’t I?”

Toji did.

“I’ll take a look at your wife. Shoko and I,” she tilted her head at her friend. “Stay outside. We’ll talk debts later.”

“I won’t do anything that directly harms my family,” Toji said. “They’re my bottomline.”

“Calm down, family man,” she rolled her teal eyes at him. “You’re embarrassing me in front of my friends. Shoko.”

The two walked past her, leaving him alone with the Six Eyes and his friend.

“Cute kid,” Gojo said. “Strong, too.”

000

“Teira, I don’t like this at all,” Shoko whispered, clutching my sleeve as we both looked at the sickly form of one Fushiguro Yumeko, her head bandaged from a prior brain surgery that hadn’t taken well. She was sallow and sickly, just skin and bones.

“Why?” I asked her.

“I don’t… want to let her die. After I just saw her husband beg us to save her.”

I breathed and nodded.

Her words were like a wave of compassion that slightly melted my cold exterior, and reminded me that beyond the grudge I had with Toji, Shoko’s words were the most essential details there were.

A grieving husband, a single father, a dying mother and wife.

There was a weight to this situation. A weight that Shoko was yet to get used to. A weight that I honestly hadn’t even registered.

“Use your R-ray,” I said to her. “Let’s get started.”

“What if I fail?”

“Then she dies,” I said plainly. “And we try again. With someone else, of course,” I added lamely.

“I don’t want her to die.”

“Neither do I.” Though I didn’t feel very strongly about it one way or the other.

“I’m not good enough.”

“You can’t say that for certain,” I pointed out. “But Shoko, if you don’t want to do this… that’s fine, too.”

“Huh?!”

I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed it gently. “You’re under no obligation to do this just because I asked you to. It’s your power. You can do with it as you please.”

“But you said… you said I was blessed, so I needed to cure the ill and the wounded,” she murmured.

I furrowed my brows. “I said no such thing, Shoko. I told you very specifically that you don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to do,” I leaned close to her face so that our eyes were only inches apart. “Listen to me: your healing is a gift, not a purpose. You can use it to save those you love, and that would be your choice alone.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m not… the hero-type, Teira. But even I think that’s wrong.”

“How so?”

“No one else has this power. That means that if I don’t use it to save lives, then people will die.”

“People die, Shoko,” I said softly.

“Fine—I know you didn’t tell me that healing was my duty, but I… believe it, Teira. I can’t just not believe it. It is my duty, and it’s scary, and I’m confused and I can’t think clearly—but I want to do this,” she gazed intensely into my eyes. “Okay? So don’t… tell me that I can just choose not to. I can’t, alright?!”

“What do you want me to say, then?”

“Tell me that if I don’t do it, she’ll die. Tell me that if I don’t get better, people will die,” she balled her hands into fists. They were shaking. “Tell me that the world depends on me,” her voice shook.

“You want me to curse you with duty.”

“Just tell me—“

I pulled back from her. “No.”

“W-what?”

“This is your opportunity to learn how to strengthen your imagination. The same imagination you said wouldn’t allow you to picture yourself being impressive. I can’t picture your duty for you. Only you get to define it. Is it true that if you don’t get better, people will die? Yes. Is it true that much depends on you? Yes. But why should you care just because I told you? I already don’t believe that you need to go out of your own way. I want you to live selfishly because I want you to be happy. Because I’m your friend.”

She looked down at the ground, fingers clawing the air to her sides, as if she was grasping for words.

“I will never curse you, Shoko. I don’t think…” I chuckled breathlessly. My old friend remorse was welling up in my heart. I hadn’t experienced that thing in a while. The pain of regret for another. The sympathetic pain of a loved one hurting. “I don’t think I could live with myself if I did.”

I was already well into being a monster. I was already pushing my own boundaries by training Shoko. I had allowed my own trauma to inform the intensity of our training. The regret for not saving Michiko…

I couldn’t cross this line.

“Thank you, Teira,” she said to me quietly. She turned her head up to look at me, and there was no longer any quivering in her eyes, or even her cursed energy. “Very well, then—I won’t kid myself. I’m not a hero. I just think that if I let my gift go to waste, I’d feel like shit. There’s no helping that, so I might as well do what feels right. I’ll follow this whim however far it takes me. I’ll quit whenever I want if I feel like it. But right now, this is what I want to do.”

She took a step towards the bedridden woman, held her hand out, and sent a focused beam of positive energy, activating her technique, the R-Ray.

---

A/N: Fushiguro Yumeko was a victim to one of these fuckheads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butsukari_otoko

Insane. Literally insane.